by Cave, Hugh
She reached for his hand and again looked intently into his face. "You really mean it, don't you? You have had an accident."
He nodded.
She glanced at the man by the truck, who was still shouting instructions at the youth in the lake. "Let's talk," she said, and drew Jeff away from there, toward a cluster of boulders that, in an old-world setting, could have been the remnants of an old castle tumbled by an earthquake. There she peered at his face yet again and said, "I'm Verna Clark, Jeff Gordon. Does that mean anything to you?"
He let his mind work on the names awhile. Jeff Gordon. Yes, he was Jeff Gordon. And she... "You're a professor, sort of? That's what you told me, isn't it? A professor, sort of. Looking for fossils."
She let out a held breath as an expression of relief chased the frown of concern from her face. It was really a beautiful face. "That's right, looking for fossils. And on the way to town I told you how the Everols were giving me fits. And you promised to talk to them about me. Jeff, what happened? What accident are you talking about?"
He was beginning to remember that, too. A car behind him in the dark, coming much too fast. Sideswiping his car and sending him off the road, through a ditch, into a grove of trees. He recalled his frantic efforts to avoid hitting the trees as he struggled to bring his car to a stop. Then the crash.
When he was sure he had it right in his mind, he told her about it.
"And you ended up at the Everols' place anyway?" she said. "But that's not surprising. Theirs is the only house along here. So tell me about them, huh? What are they like?"
Delighted that he was able to do so, he told her about Everett, and Everett's tiny wife Blanche, and Blanche's equally tiny sister Susan, and Everett's tall sister Amanda. He mentioned the Haitian couple and the cottage, and his suspicion that they might be into voodoo. And when Verna Clark said, "How would you know that?" he was able to say without hesitation, "Because I spent last summer in Haiti, studying voodoo. Because my hobby—which I hope someday will become more than a hobby—is psychic research. And that's why I'm here in Florida. With the Everols' permission—reluctantly given, but still permission—I'm here to investigate what's been happening in that house of theirs."
"And you have a date with me this evening," Verna Clark said, smiling now. "Do you also remember that?"
"To take you to dinner at the Clandon Inn."
"Right. Phew!" She shook her head in wonder. "You really had me scared. But will you be able to keep our date? Will your car be okay?"
He didn't think it would be, he admitted. "And I have no money, Verna. While I was out cold after being run off the road, someone took everything I had. So until I can phone a friend to wire me some money, I guess we'd better—"
"No, you don't." Her head shake was emphatic. "We go to dinner as planned. On me this first time. I want to talk to you."
He was delighted. "All right! But now I'd better get back to the house. The garage man is supposed—" He turned to look at the tow truck by the lake. "Oh-oh. This is the garage man, isn't it?"
"I'm sure it is." Verna nodded. "He's the only one around."
The youth in the lake had finished his job while they were talking, and the man on the bank was climbing into the truck now. They were father and son, Jeff guessed. The boy must be about sixteen; the man was big and bearded, with hair down to his shoulders, and wore a gray sweatshirt with HOWE'S AUTO REPAIR on it in red.
The truck's engine growled. The tow chain rose tautly from the dark water; dripping weeds and mud. Verna Clark's little red car crept up onto dry land like an oversized turtle.
All at once Jeff's attention was caught by a movement in a tangle of brush at the top of the knoll. A man stood there, hands on hips, apparently watching what was happening. A man not young, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers. Was it the Haitian? Was it Everett Everol? Before he could see enough to decide, the fellow apparently realized he had been spotted and, with an abrupt about-face, disappeared.
Disappeared so quickly that it seemed a little strange, even unnatural. There one second, gone the next. But before Jeff could think more about it, he saw that Verna Clark's car was rigged for the tow to town and Mr. Howe was beckoning.
"Hey, Miss Clark! Have to talk to you about this, and I got another job to do this mornin'!"
"The other job is my car," Jeff said to Verna.
"Yes. And I have to go." She touched his hand. "Look. I have a borrowed car out on the highway. It's how I got here. Suppose I pick you up this evening, about seven."
"Great."
"I won't come to the house, though. They might try something else on me." Her glance at the car said she still thought the Everols were responsible for its rolling into the lake, with her supposed to be inside it. "I'll wait for you at their gate. Okay?"
"Seven o'clock. I'll be there."
She hurried to the truck, and Jeff climbed the knoll for his return walk to the house. On reaching the top, he wondered again how the man watching them could have disappeared so quickly? By stepping behind a boulder, perhaps? That must be the answer. Many on the knoll were big enough.
He had other things to think about, he realized as he continued his return journey to the house. Why hadn't the Everols told him who he was? They knew, of course. In urging them to let him come here, he had sent them a copy of a magazine article about him, with a full-page photo. Blanche must have known who he was when she opened the door and said, "Are you Mr. Gordon? We've been expecting you." And the others must have known when she led him into the living room, where they were waiting.
So why had they kept him in the dark about it? And what should he do now? Tell them he knew who he was, and ask for an explanation of their behavior?
No, he decided. Wait. If they were playing some kind of game with him, he would have a better chance of finding out what they were up to if he said nothing.
But he should stay with them if they would let him. Despite their puzzling treatment of him, one Everol was dead and another insane, so they had to be the victims, not the instigators, of what was happening here.
Chapter Eight
According to the weathered sign above its doorway, the Clandon Inn had been erected in 1908. It looked even older.
"And it's not the oldest building in this town, by a long shot," Verna Clark said as she and Jeff walked to it from her car. "I expected to be staying here, actually, but after a fire last month they closed it for repairs. All except the dining room."
"A fire?"
"Some newspaper people were here, investigating the disappearance of a woman. One of them was smoking in bed. Nobody was hurt, thank heaven."
She was happy to have someone to talk to, Jeff guessed. Since picking him up at the Everols' gate she had scarcely stopped for breath. Mostly, so far, she had talked about how uncomfortable she felt at the Watsons', and how she would move in a minute if they weren't the only people in town who took in roomers.
Except for two other couples and a family of two adults and three small children, the Clandon Inn dining room was empty. Jeff indicated a corner table where Verna and he might talk without being overheard, and a waiter in his sixties, wearing black trousers and a white shirt, led them to it. Jeff sent a quizzical look after him as he departed with their order.
"Does every male around here wear black pants and a white shirt?" He, of course, had on the only outfit he possessed at the moment: the tan slacks and lightweight brown jacket he had been wearing when he regained consciousness in his wrecked car. Where, he wondered, were the rest of his clothes now? And his wallet? And the notebook he'd been carrying, with his scribblings about the Everol case and certain voodoo services in Haiti?
"Does every male do what?" Verna said.
"Dress that way, in black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt. First Everol. Then the Haitian fellow, and the one I told you about who was watching us from the knoll. Now our waiter."
Realizing he wasn't serious, she let a smile chase the look of concern from
her face.
"You were telling me about the sinkhole," Jeff reminded her.
"Yes. Well, as I said, it's on the Everol property, and the Everols have threatened to fence it off, but people do go there. At least they used to. One Sunday when her husband wanted to watch the Miami Dolphins on TV, a Mrs. Shelby took their two children there. Not to swim, of course. Just for a picnic. And when the little girl's mother and brother were busy laying out the food and not watching her, she disappeared."
"And your Earl Watson found her."
"Scuba diving is his hobby. The police asked him to search the sinkhole and he brought the child up, but of course she was dead. Since then, everyone calls the place the Drowning Pit."
"Even the Everols?"
"Well, I don't know about them. They don't talk to me. But the townspeople do."
"And where is it, exactly?"
"You know where we were standing when you saw the man on the knoll?"
Jeff nodded.
"Well, as I told you when I took you there to look at my car, the knoll isn't on the Everol property and I wasn't trespassing. But the other side of it is theirs, and the Drowning Pit is near the foot of it on that side."
Jeff nodded. "I passed it before I climbed the knoll. A spooky kind of place, like the water-filled quarry pits we have in New England."
"There are three or four others on the Everol property, I've heard. You know what a Florida sinkhole is, don't you?"
"Tell me."
"Well, they're usually vertical shafts created when the roofs of caves give way. If what's underneath is only an isolated pocket in the limestone, the shaft just fills up with rainwater. But if what's down there is a whole network of chambers and tunnels already filled with water, the shaft becomes an entrance to an underwater cave system."
"What kind is the Drowning Pit?"
"Just a deep shaft full of rainwater, Jack Watson says. But we have many underwater caves in this part of Florida, and there have been lots of drownings. I read somewhere that more than eighty divers have drowned here since nineteen-sixty."
Jeff had not tried to change the subject. Verna Clark had a need to talk to someone, he told himself. She was lonely, and as a stranger in Clandon, putting herself at risk in the research she was trying to do, she had every right to be apprehensive as well. Obviously she did not feel she could talk freely to the people at whose home she was staying.
But what a woman she was! The young lady he had picked up on the highway yesterday had been striking enough in pants, shirt, and floppy hat. Now, sitting opposite him in a soft white cotton dress, with her golden hair free to frame her face, she was nothing less than lovely. So let her talk. Let her talk about anything at all. He was content just to sit and look at her while listening.
"Have the Everols mentioned me?" she asked.
"No.""They haven't warned you to stay away from me? That I'm a terrible creature who keeps threatening their privacy?"
"I haven't talked to them that much."
"Tell me more about them, Jeff. Please."
"First tell me what you already know. About Jacob, for instance. And his twin sister, who's in the asylum."
Before she could answer, the waiter came with their dinners of grouper—fresh caught in the nearby Gulf, if the menu was truthful. He departed, and Verna said, "All I know is what I read in the papers when it happened, plus a few details supplied by the Watsons when I asked them about it." She frowned, as though wondering how much she ought to say, then seemed to relax. "Have you read Daphne Du Maurier's story of the birds that became killers and waged war on people? Hitchcock made a movie of it."
"The Birds. Yes."
"Well, last month Jacob Everol is supposed to have been attacked by a huge vulture and just about torn to pieces. That's the story his twin sister Ethel told, anyway. She said she heard a loud noise and glass breaking. Then she heard Jacob screaming and ran to his room, and the bird was on his bed, holding him down with its talons and tearing at him with its beak. It had his whole face torn off, she said. When she screamed, it turned and looked at her, its eyes blazing as if they were on fire, and then it flew out through a big hole in the wall where a window had been. It must have made the hole when it broke in, she said. Is that the story you heard?"
He nodded. "Basically, yes. I only read it, of course. And heard what was reported on TV."
"Well, that's all I did, except for what the Watsons have told me."
"What about the second visit of the vulture?"
"It appeared at a window of Ethel's room the next night, but she was awake and saw it in time to escape downstairs. But it frightened her so much that she went out of her mind. The Everols tried to take care of her at home but ended up having to put her in some asylum."
Again Jeff nodded.
For a moment Verna concentrated on her dinner. Then, looking at him again, she said more quietly, "There's something else I want to talk about, Jeff."
"Yes?"
"About why I'm here. Because I'm frightened and need to confide in someone I can trust."
Pushing his plate aside, Jeff looked at her and waited.
"I'm not a—professor, sort of." Her smile was gone almost before he could be sure he had seen it. "And my name isn't Verna Clark. It's Linda Mason, and I'm only a graduate student of archaeology. My older sister, Kimberly, is the professor."
Jeff only nodded.
"Kim is the one who made the important finds near the Everol property," Linda Mason went on, choosing her words slowly and with care. "We're talking about last month. I was in school, of course. She phoned me and said she had found some fantastic animal remains—fossils—that she thought might be even more important than the seven-thousand-year-old human ones those construction workers discovered at Windover in eighty-two—the ones with complete, well-preserved brains, if you're up on such things. She was wildly excited."
"And?"
"She called me four times in all. Four calls in two weeks, while she was staying right here at the Clandon Inn. Then the calls stopped coming and another week went by, and I had a call from the police up here, asking a whole lot of questions. My sister had disappeared."
"The woman who disappeared," Jeff said. "Newsmen here—the fire at this hotel—"
"Mother, too, had been in touch with Kimberly by phone right along, of course. Our dad is dead. But the people at the inn here, who didn't have any real idea of what she was doing, said she had simply gone out one morning and not come back. Her car was found near the Everol place. Her clothes and things were still in her room."
"This was last month?"
"Early last month. May."
"Before Jacob was killed and his sister went insane?"
She nodded. "I came here with Mother, of course. In Kim's room we found the fossils she had talked about. They've since been identified as parts of a huge carnivorous bird, like the one discovered near Gainsville in sixty-one, and an enormous, equally old wolf. Nothing had been disturbed. But Kim had vanished."
"The police were trying to find your sister, of course?"
"They questioned everyone for days."
"Including the Everols?"
A frown touched her face. "The Everols were first on the list because her car was found near there. And because of their ongoing war against intruders. They said they'd seen her a number of times on or near their property and had warned her not to trespass, but that was all."
"But now you think—"
"Jeff, all I know is, Kim and I were very close. If she were alive, she would never cut me out of her life like this. I want to know what happened to her."
Jeff was silent for a moment. Then he said with a frown, "Did she come here to look for fossils or just happen to find some here?"
"She said in her first letter that she was driving through and stopped because she had to go to the bathroom. She walked in off the road—from her description it might have been near that pond my car rolled into—and found a piece of bone that some dog probably dug up
. Easter break was only two days off, so after studying the bone in the college lab she came back here to investigate, intending to make a project of it if it seemed promising."
"And there's never been a clue to what happened to her?"
She shook her head. "I suspect the Everols, of course, because of their attitude toward strangers. Twice before I've been here trying to find out something. Now I intend to spend the summer here if I have to."
He told her about the snake thing at his window. "Probably I only dreamed the snake, but actually, in sleep, got out of bed and drew the pentagram. So far as I know, the Everols haven't had any trouble since the vulture claimed Jacob and Ethel."
"A vulture and a serpent," she said. "Both from a time we know almost nothing about. Jeff, what's going on?"
"Well, if I really did see the snake, someone has opened a door perhaps."
"A door?"
"To the time when these things existed here in Florida." He frowned at her. "What have you found since you came here, Verna? I'd better call you Verna, hadn't I? Otherwise my tongue might slip when it shouldn't."
"I haven't found anything, really."
"But you said when I first met you—"
"Uh-uh." She shook her head. "I didn't know you then. All I've been doing is looking for the answer to Kim's disappearance. The fossils are only an excuse for snooping around. Which reminds me, when we leave here I have to go to the bus station to pick up a package. Come with me?"
"Of course. By the way, where did you get your car? I may need one."
"From Staley Howe, the garage man."
"He rents them?"
"No, he just lent it to me. There isn't a car rental place in Clandon."
"Here's hoping he can fix mine, then."
They ate in silence for a few minutes, Jeff pondering the significance of what she had told him about her sister. Could there be some link between the sister's disappearance and what was going on at the Everols'? It was possible, he decided. Kim had unearthed remains of prehistoric creatures on the Everol property. Reincarnations of those creatures were now preying on the Everol clan. Had she somehow opened a door in time?
